


Interactive Complexity as Indigenous to Human Systems

by raspberryhunter



Category: Moses und Aron - Schoenberg, תנ"ך | Tanakh
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Crack AU of crack AU, Don't Have to Know Canon, Gen, Humor, I'm not entirely sure knowing canon will help, Organizational Theory, Quantum Mechanics, Religious philosophy reimagined as science/organizational philosophy, Tragedy/Comedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-30
Updated: 2012-11-30
Packaged: 2017-11-19 21:23:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/577811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raspberryhunter/pseuds/raspberryhunter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>From Aaron shall Moses' voice speak, as from Moses mine.</i> </p><p>Or:  ...if Schoenberg wrote Bible crack!AU fanfic instead of an opera, and put all his philosophical kinks in it. The one where Moses is a scientist, Aaron is his sales guy, and God is the CEO.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interactive Complexity as Indigenous to Human Systems

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seekingferret](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingferret/gifts).



> Thank you to my betas for totally being awesome in so many ways, including elementals for wordsmithing, mithrigil for summarizing the fic for me, and especially sprocket for pushing this to become something like a coherent fic and saving the Meriba scene!
> 
> This is readable if you are not familiar with _Moses und Aron_ , but the whole setting and philosophical disagreements may make more sense if you've watched it. Um. Or possibly not. It is also readable if you don't know the Biblical story, and may make more or possibly less sense if you do; you may not get some of the worse puns, which I don't know, may be a plus? The rating of PG-13 is for language and for more philosophy than I think is actually allowable in a PG fic.
> 
> seekingferret, I just... don't even know what to say. I watched this opera at the same time I was reading/writing way too much about organizational theory as well as having coworker conversations about sales/HR vs. tech staff, and, well.... somehow this came out of that unholy alchemy.

The man in the doorway of Moshe's office looked entirely too cheerful and well-dressed. "Aaron Levi," he said, walking up to Moshe's desk and extending a hand, which Moshe didn't take. "You're Moshe Amram, I take it. The Chief Scientist."

Moshe raised an eyebrow. So this was the guy from Sales that the CEO had seen fit to inflict upon him. "Yeah. Let's get right to it. You know why you're here? I told the CEO I was really great at ideas, but I hate talking to customers, trying to tell them that we're not going to compromise the work for them just because they want us to. That is now your job, Mr. Levi."

"Aaron," the man insisted, the smile on his round face not wavering. Moshe started wondering whether he was a glutton for punishment, a moron, or simply had no sense of self-preservation. "If we'll be working together, we need to be familiar with each other. Break down the artificial hierarchical constraints --"

"Let me get one thing straight, _Aaron_ ," Moshe said to him. "You are working for me, doing the things I don't want to do. I'm not here to be your buddy, or listen to you complain about your wife --"

"Her name's Ellie," Aaron interjected helpfully. "You'd like her; we should go out sometime. It's important to connect on a personal level to your coworkers, you know. And as Ellie always says --"

"-- _or_ ," Moshe plowed on determinedly, "have deep meaningful conversations with you. About anything."

Aaron's lips twitched. "How about philosophical arguments?"

Moshe blinked.

The other man said, almost apologetically, "Arnold, down in Technical, said --"

Moshe sighed loudly, stroked his beard. " _Yes_ , Arnold and I talk about quantum foundations sometimes. That doesn't mean I ever want to discuss -- what did you major in, sales studies or human-resources-ology or --"

"Organizational theory," Aaron said primly. "I have a Master's degree."

Moshe rolled his eyes hard. "Yeah, that."

*

"No," Moshe said, stabbing a finger. "There's one truth. _One_. Not a whole bunch of... I don't even know what to call them. Meta-truths? Sense-truths? Are those even words? If they are, they shouldn't be."

"I'm not saying I disagree, Moshe," Aaron said patiently. "I'm just saying that we have no _access_ to that truth. What we experience with our senses is the only truth we ever get to know."

"With all due respect, that's crap, Aaron."

"It's about creating meaning in what we see, what we experience. If you read Karl Weick --"

"What is, is. There's no _meaning_ to it. It just _is_. Any scientist knows that."

Aaron sat back, looked at his watch. "Why are we talking about philosophy at work, anyway, past close-of-business? Let's go get a beer."

"Now that's an idea I can get behind," Moshe said.

*

"So what's your perspective on love?" Aaron asked, a number of beers later. "Ellie often compares it to --"

"An abstract concept," Moshe said immediately, cutting him off. "An illusion. Not relevant to the truth, which is simply a biological imperative."

Aaron's lips twitched. His eyes slid to Moshe's wedding ring. "What does your wife think about that?"

Moshe thought about rolling his eyes again, but decided it would probably just encourage the man. "Zipporah and I don't talk about things like this."

Aaron considered him thoughtfully. "Well." He took a swig of his beer. "Um. So, Moshe, something I've been curious about -- how'd you end up working for this company, anyway? You were in academia before you came here, I understand?"

Moshe shrugged. "Yeah. The CEO recruited me -- she's brilliant; most business people don't have any technical sense at all, but she has these ideas for algorithmic analysis that are light-years beyond anything else in the field. Have you seen the Canaan contract? The kinds of algorithms that are being developed for that work are just --" He noticed that his voice had sped up without his noticing. He scowled deeply and stopped talking.

Aaron gave him a brilliant smile. "So you do love the ideas, yes?"

Moshe regarded the other man with suspicion. " _Love_ is such a loaded word. Let's say that I am not likely to leave the company while we're doing this work."

*

"No," said Aaron earnestly, picking up a pencil from Moshe's desk and idly twirling it between his fingers. "Consider a quantum system --"

Moshe bellowed, "I am sick, _sick_ , of you sales types spouting quantum mechanics as if it explains all your philosophical difficulties." He had startled Aaron into dropping the pencil. Moshe ignored Aaron's scrambling under the desk. "The Heisenberg uncertainty principle doesn't imply free will, that's a misunderstanding of basic logic principles --"

"That's not what I was going to say," Aaron protested mildly from under Moshe's desk. "Have you been listening to a thing I'm saying? I've been arguing all along that humans access reality through an interface, we don't get access to the underlying truth." He reappeared triumphantly with the pencil, waving it in the air. "Same with a quantum system -- you don't get measurement access to the underlying quantum state. In fact, quantum error-correcting codes rely on not directly measuring the encoded state, right?"

Moshe belatedly realized he was staring with his mouth slightly open. He shut his mouth. "Uh. Hm. You may have a point there." Curiosity got the better of him. "How do you know that, anyway?"

Aaron smirked. "Just because I'm a sales guy and have my graduate degree in organizational theory doesn't mean I don't know _something_ about science."

Moshe said slowly, "Wait. I've been reading a bunch of papers by E. Levi lately, the physicist who's done all that brilliant work on quantum fault tolerance. Is that -- Ellie?"

Aaron smirked again.

*

"So the customer wants to see a prototype."

"Um, _no_. We're delivering analysis, not bells and whistles. The customer clearly has no idea as to what's going on here if he's asking for that."

"You can't just tell the customer that he has no idea. You want to keep our customers, don't you? Look." Aaron grabbed a pencil from Moshe's desk. Moshe estimated that Aaron had walked away with around twenty of his pencils at this point, but he had stopped bothering to say anything about it, not that Aaron paid the slightest bit of attention. "A system like this," Aaron said, starting to sketch on the yellow legal pad he always seemed to carry with him, "a GUI architecture -- you don't have to use the GUI to do your analysis, but customers always like pretty graphics --"

Moshe leaned over the paper. What Aaron had drawn was, he thought, doable and even oddly elegant in its own way. "Yeah, okay, that's actually not a terrible idea. Bez and Oholi can implement that, they know how to do that kind of thing." Moshe paused. He had the strangest sensation, and when he examined it, he realized he was enjoying himself. With a sales guy. He snorted. Aaron raised an eyebrow. Moshe admitted, "I was just thinking that this wasn't so bad. Working with you."

Aaron smiled at him. "Yeah, I'm having fun too."

*

Aaron looked a bit pale, Moshe thought, or maybe it was just that he hadn't seen the guy in a while. "Hey, Moshe, welcome back. Haven't seen you for quite a while. How was the trip?"

Moshe scowled. "The conference? It was boring, as I expected. The CEO's talk was good; she talked about some of the mathematical ideas we've been making some progress on." He cheered up. "But I got to talk to some colleagues I hadn't seen in years. That part was great. Joseph Jacobs and I got to really hammer some things out --"

"It took longer than I expected." Aaron's voice seemed strained. "The conference was only a week; I was expecting you back then."

"Yeah, you got my email, right? Joe and I were so close to proving all ten theorems we'd been working on, all ten, do you realize how huge that is? I just had to extend the trip and take some of that vacation I've been saving up."

"Well, so, while you were gone..." Aaron fidgeted, which was very unlike him. Moshe narrowed his eyes. "You know how we signed the contract recently with the Golden folks, for designing a module to look at correlations in their data? They've been getting on my case about wanting innovative solutions, and I didn't know when you were coming back. You were gone for forty _days_ , Moshe! That's more than a month! Hell, you weren't answering my emails, for all I knew you were quitting and going back to academia. And I even tried to contact the CEO, but she's gone mountain-climbing or something, she was unreachable. So, I was talking to the Golden guys, and remember how you and I were talking about quantum correlations, I thought we could use those kinds of algorithms to make a GUI to visually represent their data."

Moshe groaned. "That sentence doesn't even parse, Aaron! What we were talking about was a math and physics idea, it's not something you can turn into a, a shiny little widget --"

"I asked Designs to do a mockup."

Moshe stopped. "You what?"

"Yeah. The Golden Calf, the project's being called now --"

Moshe stared at him. "Oh no. No. Aaron, this is horrible. It doesn't work like that! The customer's going to have an illusion that isn't what we actually have, they're going to reject what we really do, this is a disaster. Fuck. Does the CEO know about this? She is going to shit bricks! Sideways!"

"Um, yeah," Aaron said, looking diffident for the first time since Moshe had known him. "Yeah. So, about that... I figured out it was a bad idea as soon as I showed the customer and their sales staff went crazy. I was wondering if --"

"You want me to talk to the CEO for you," said Moshe slowly. "Intercede for you. Get her used to the idea that we are going to lose sales from that customer, that there's going to be disappointment and bad blood on all sides." He laughed grimly. "Haven't we spent enough time together that you know I'm not good at stuff like that?"

"But she _likes_ you," Aaron said, in a pleading voice that was almost a whine. "I'm just a lowly sales guy, she doesn't even know who I am."

"Oh, she does know," Moshe contradicted. "She's the one who set me up with you in the first place. Oh _fuck._ She is going to be so angry. If she doesn't know about it already, which she probably does. Fuck. All right, Aaron, I'll talk to her."

Aaron smiled wanly at him.

*

Moshe was glad Aaron was mostly back to his old self after the Golden Calf debacle. To his surprise, he found himself trying to hasten this process, mostly by ranting; for some reason this seemed to cheer Aaron up.

"I cannot believe that people actually write papers on this," Moshe expostulated to the other man. "Organizational theory isn't a _theory_. A theory is a well-confirmed type of explanation of nature, made in a way consistent with the scientific method. It is _not_ some guy wanking off on how he thinks that maybe _if people talked more to each other they wouldn't screw up as much._ "

Aaron's eyes crinkled. "Hey, have you actually been reading Weick?"

"The things I do for my frie -- for my sales guy," Moshe complained, and was rewarded by a real smile from Aaron. Obscurely comforted, Moshe smiled back.

*

Aaron came in with his ubiquitous yellow legal pad and a large folder. He was smiling, as usual, but there was something about the set of his shoulders that looked weary and harried. Moshe knew what he was going to say before he said it. "It's Meriba-Kadesh. Again."

Moshe scowled. "I wish Meriba weren't our best customer. Who knew there was so much money in water treatment, or that working in water purification made you such a dick? What do they want now?"

Aaron dropped heavily into a chair. "You know how Miriam was working on their stuff --"

"Yeah. Our best coder, and she quits to play the odds at a sexy startup." Moshe sighed. "No one's had the _time_ to learn how to code in Rocque yet to work on that module. Meriba's complaining about that, are they?"

"You know how it goes, Moshe -- 'why wasn't it done yesterday?' and all that. They're really starting to put the pressure on." There were dark circles under Aaron's eyes; Moshe found himself wondering how much sleep the man had gotten lately.

Moshe snapped, "We can implement it. We've got all the algorithms developed. The bottleneck is the Rocque coding, it's optimized for doing the processing they want, but it's going to take some work to get someone up to speed in it."

"Yes, that's the thing. You're going to have to get coders pulled off other projects and up to speed on this one, the CEO will have to okay it, it'll have to get implemented and all the bugs fixed -- the timeline is too compressed. We won't make our deliverable schedule, Meriba will be all over us; they’ll probably cite it as a reason not to pay us, too."

Moshe frowned. He was right. " _Fuck_ Meriba. So what do you suggest?"

Aaron looked vaguely around for a pencil, but found none, as Moshe had become savvy enough to stash them away whenever he saw Aaron coming near. Instead, he pulled out a pen from his pocket and started drawing rapidly on his pad. Moshe noticed the lines were not quite straight. "I discussed it with their sales guys, we tossed around some alternatives, and I think I know how we can do this," Aaron said, speaking so quickly the words were almost tripping over each other. "We can save this."

"You discussed it with -- You and their sales guys came to an agreement." Moshe rubbed his temples. "You can't just _toss around some alternatives with them_ like they're our Technical guys, you can't --" He sighed. "But regardless, learning the Rocque is just going to take time, which we don't have right now--"

" _Strike_ the Rocque, Moshe, get rid of it for now. For now it just has to be an image, not the real thing, but an image that speaks to them, and then we fill in the details later."

Moshe shivered as he looked at the figures starting to fill up Aaron's paper. "We can't do that. We _cannot_ do that, Aaron. Do you know what you're asking? To misrepresent the analysis, even temporarily -- that's not right -- I can't -- and the CEO will have a fit if she finds out --" He thought of the bright clarity of the CEO's work, the work he had come here to do; of pure algorithms existing apart from deadlines or graphical interfaces. He thought of the emails from Meriba with increasingly demanding subject lines that he deleted without opening but knew Aaron had to read, the drawn tired lines of the Aaron's face, the way Aaron's hands were shaking. "This is going to end in disaster," Moshe said aloud.

"But look," Aaron said, "Meriba will be so totally on board with this --"

Knowing even as he spoke that it was a bad idea, Moshe said slowly, "Keep talking, Aaron."

Aaron kept talking.

*

Moshe didn't know how long Aaron had been there before he looked up from his proof and saw the other man standing silently before his desk. "Aaron."

"Dr. Amram," Aaron said blankly. He hadn't, Moshe noticed, picked up any of the multiple pencils that were on his desk.

"Aaron, I --"

"I'm going at the end of the day," Aaron said, his voice a monotone. "I'm just packing up my office right now. I was fortunate that I have a friend in Kansas who's willing to hire me, even after being fired here."

Moshe tried to say something, but Aaron spoke over him. "Ellie might not go with me," Aaron said. "She's got tenure here, there's nothing for her in Kansas. I might lose her too. But why am I telling you this? You know it all already, don't you, Dr. Amram?"

"Don't call me that," Moshe said, a little desperately. "Aaron --"

Aaron raised his eyebrows. "I don't think you have anything to say to me."

"I didn't have any choice. Aaron, Meriba wasn't the first time that the customers were let down because of products we either can't or shouldn't deliver. There was the whole Golden Calf incident, you know -- you just _tell_ the customer things, Aaron. You feel and think like the customer, you want to promise the customer things that aren't really part of the idea, that aren't what we can or should do. Aaron, I'm not even asking you to think like a scientist, like someone from Technical. Just -- not like the customer."

"You're not asking me anything. And it wasn't just me at Meriba, Moshe. Or don't you remember that? I suppose there aren't any consequences for you, Chief Scientist."

Moshe said, looking straight ahead, "The CEO and I have agreed that I'm resigning at the end of the month, after I get to a good stopping place on the Canaan contract. Josh Nunson is going to be taking over the Chief Scientist position. Zipporah and I are moving to Boston; I'm going to go back to academia after all."

Aaron blinked, momentarily taken aback, but then his face regained its impassivity. "That bad, huh. A tenure-track position just waiting for you." He swallowed. "I promised myself I wasn't going to beg, but -- Moshe --"

Moshe looked away from him, unable to meet his eyes. "I can't --" he said. "I can't let the work be compromised. Not again. I _can't_ , Aaron."

Aaron said quietly, "I thought you might at least try to save me, even if you didn't agree with me. I thought you were my friend." Not looking back at Moshe, he stepped quickly out the door and shut it softly. 

Moshe stared at the closed door for a long time. "Friendship is an illusion," he whispered. "It's not a reflection of the way things really are. It's not -- relevant to the truth."

But there was nobody to hear him, or to reply.

**Author's Note:**

> While writing this, I heavily consulted the Allen Forte translation of _Moses und Aron_ and the English Standard Version of the Bible. The title is taken from a subtitle in Karl Weick's paper _The Vulnerable System: An Analysis of the Tenerife Air Disaster_.


End file.
